Inspiration

Whether it is the bouquet of roses I ordered to surprise my sweetheart, or the pile of corn flakes I ordered to fill up the safety stock, I wouldn’t like to pick up the phone to check where my order is. Whether you are the CEO of a billion dollar organization or an owner of a local grocery store, you are challenged to deliver on customers’ increasing expectations. Therefore, CEOs and business owners must find ways to streamline their delivery operations and gain competitive advantage by removing the barriers and overcoming the challenges that delay the delivery processes.

With the availability of innovative technology, you can overcome 5 common challenges you might face in your business operation.
<h2><strong>1. Time wasted on Order Management</strong></h2>
Most of the businesses with a fleet of delivery transport provide either a scheduled or on-demand delivery service. To manage order fulfillment one most use either pen &amp; paper, phone calls, and messy spreadsheets or clunky enterprise software which are not well equipped with modern business demands. The time needed to take an individual order with the customer information, document it, dispatching it on to the driver, communicate back to the customer and follow up on an order means that one employee might have to spend an average of more than 10 minutes per order. However, automating the chain of order fulfillment can reduce this window of receiving and processing an order to less than a minute for every order!

With a modern automation system, you cannot only cut down on the number of steps in your delivery process and automate the workflow but also you can achieve superior integration with other critical solutions and streamline the entire delivery management. It essentially will help you to have a centralized delivery management system to have more control and visibility of the delivery operation.
<h2><strong>2. Route Optimization</strong></h2>
Delivery delay is one of the main reasons of customer dissatisfaction. One of the main reasons of such delays is inefficient routes taken by the drivers to deliver the batched orders. Inefficient routes could be the result of lack of traffic information such as traffic jam, accidents, longer routes, and also inability to consider the customers availability time by the driver while delivering the orders. A good delivery management system will have the algorithm to ensure that drivers complete the (batched) orders in the least amount time by taking customers availability time into consideration along with delivery route information.

For instance <a href=”http://www.wimoapp.com”>WIMO</a> has integrated Google Maps API both in the admin panel and driver app to activate the route optimization for all the deliveries. This helps you to create a truly end-end advanced delivery platform by automatically recording the delivery time, distance, and pick-up and drop-off location.
<h2><strong>3. Lack of Visibility on the Ground Team.</strong></h2>
With the aid of innovative technology tracking the whereabouts and performance of the ground teams has become a necessity rather than a business luxury. The good news for the small (or big) business owner is that you do not require to invest a good chunk of your budget to buy GPS trackers for each and every vehicles. A simple smartphone which the driver may already be possessing will be enough to track their movements and performance. With an integrated tracking app you would be able to get accurate data such as their current location in real time, delivery time taken, distance traveled etc.
<h2><strong>4. Improving Customer Communications</strong></h2>
Constantly keeping customer in the loop with notification for every steps of the order processing is an important strategy to improve customer retention and experience. Moreover, for B2B business, automated notification alert system when an order is pending, delayed, or cancelled for production issues, credit limit, or any other business reasons will help in minimizing customer conflicts, and streamlining the order management process.

Furthermore, to gain competitive advantage you can also enable your customer track their delivery in real time! This will certainly help develop customer experience.
<h2><strong>5. Absence of Insightful Analytics</strong></h2>
To grow and improve your business operation, a business owner must have access to all the financial and logistics metrics. A good delivery management system will enable the managers to have access to all the data recorded such as monthly successful and failed orders, driver’s performances, average delivery time, distance travelled by each drivers, average ratings to the drivers by the customers etc. This insight will help you to optimize your operational flow and manage your entire fleet smoothly. This is an important feature as you can gather information on your customers and customize your services based on their requirements.

The purpose behind investing in automation is to save money, time, and make order fulfilment &amp; deliveries faster. By automating tasks, you don’t need to depend on making manual entries which would save salaries of employees responsible for that task. The system also eliminates the human error and delay, if any. By making faster deliveries, you can increase your customers and revenue, in the end, pushing your profit margins higher.

In order to build a solid base of the company, spread a good reputation of the brand name and generate continuously higher revenues, each business needs to satisfy its customers. When a firm can ensure customer satisfaction, it generates a great circle of loyal clients that pay back all its efforts.

Due to the high competition in the F&amp;B market today, the bargaining power of customers is increasing significantly. Consequently, companies need to guarantee that they are offering memorable customer experience. To do so, asking for customer feedback and allowing them to benefit from a smooth customer experience when buying your products is meaningfully vital.

Delivery is also a critical step for companies that belong to the F&amp;B industry. Despite the fact that people nowadays prefer their food to be delivered to either home or office, they usually face many issues before receiving their orders. These issues can turn out to affect the business negatively. To clarify, customers who choose their order to be delivered, they end up leaving a bad customer experience. For instance, the driver is taking too long and the customer finds himself obliged to make few calls in order to make sure that the order is on its way, which costs him and the company significant amounts, if done continuously. Or, the client has an urgent matter and needs to change the location for the order to be delivered. Sometimes, the client wants to make a claim regarding a certain matter during his delivery experience with the company directly to the manager.

Now, let me introduce one solution that handles the above issues and more. WIMO, a real time delivery management platform that has as a main concern to facilitate the delivery operations for managers, drivers and customers. Before launching the platform, WIMO decided to understand in-depth and from all corners what customers face during the delivery operations. Therefore, the software covers all the main issues regarding this matter and has solutions to overcome them and boost the overall performance of F&B businesses.

By offering the opportunity of real time tracking of the drivers to customers, the software helps first to eliminate the number of calls that customers need to make for continuous checking of the order arrival. In other terms, the software sends a text message to the customer once the driver starts delivering the order with the following set of information: duration of delivery, expected time of arrival, link to track the driver etc. Furthermore, WIMO makes sure that managers receive accurate and direct feedback from the customers that allows them and the company to understand better the clients, overcome any challenges that disturb the delivery operations and make them smoother and efficient. The software works also with the driver with the same aim stated above by offering the route optimization for quicker access to the customer’s location and generates well-detailed reports about the whole task performance to give full visibility to the managers.

Since consulting for a good number of <a href=”http://www.wimoapp.com”>WIMO</a> clientele I have been privileged to gain meaningful insight towards how various organizations run their logistics operations. I have been privy to see the weaknesses in the cycles used as well as the benefits of using such cycles. One aspect of the different challenges I come across on almost a daily basis is the use of manual solutions for various challenges.

All organizations run differently and a trend that is most noticeable is the two types of characters that I come across. Some organizations have the attitude of investing in technology for the future, thereby planning to move with the times and adjust according to technological solutions that provide value, efficiency and productivity to their operations. On the other hand some clients have the mentally of “if it’s not broken, why fix it”.

In order to make the most of the resources one has and create not only a competitive advantage but reduce costs internally one must be willing to be innovative and try out not just different approaches but proven approaches that I have seen our current clientele gain from. This is where WIMO comes into play.

The WIMO platform is in summary an operations management AI that works according to parameters set by not just our clients but our client’s customers. For example; certain customers will place orders from clients and set a window for delivery. WIMO’s AI is able to judge and predict how many deliveries a driver can successfully achieve by factoring in the distance through google traffic analytics, the average delivery time for that business and also account for the time set by clients to receive deliveries.

This then allows Logistics supervisors/managers properly plan out their delivery operations (pickup and drop-off) by seeing how many batched delivery tasks a driver can perform in a day. It creates a clear path by also allowing us to create a buffer time for emergencies also. We would be able to know in advance if a prolonged delivery or an accident would then create a knock-on effect for other upcoming delivery tasks. Once this is identified, logistic managers can then send triggered emails/SMSs notifying of the pre-determined delay. Once the SMS is sent, another vehicle can be dispatched to the existing vehicle to pick-up delivery items and continue along the predetermined route and meet scheduled delivery windows.

As wonderful as this sounds, it requires an organization’s willingness to open up about logistic operations in order for it to be achieved. This means being able to see/witness how orders are prepared right from once their placed till the point they reach the customer’s location for off-loading. Trusting WIMO’s experienced consultants with your challenges is the fastest way to getting this done and subsequently make scheduling as simple and automated as possible.
<p style=”text-align: center”>“To solve your scheduling nightmares, trust a WIMO consultant today”.</p>